Not hard; just initially expensive (hardware mostly).

While I'm also a huge fan of local LLMs and believe they will be key in the future; I think the claim of "just as good" is hyperbole. They're productively useful tools though, and something worth exploration.

Well GLM-5.1 is 744billion params, no way I can run that locally. I use the opencode Go or Zen subscription. They have a zero day retention policy for all the model providers which is nice. And then I can still use little local models like qwen and stuff by just swapping over to them.

But GLM is SOTA level for code, so it's obviously going to beat all local small models by a lot.